This is not a love poem to you, oh moon —
you’ve had a few too many already,
and maybe I don’t appreciate how you’ve been
following me wherever I go, a fact I first noticed
on some winter night in Thief River Falls,
after my brother’s Boy Scout meeting,
where we all watched that movie about
the tiny canoe with the American Indian doll,
drifting away down a mighty river. Anyway,
I looked up at you and felt small, too aware of
the sky and how it stretched over all the places
I’d ever been and ever lived, and how you were
the same moon everywhere. So, moon, I think
we’re a little past love poems, after all this time —
don’t you? (But if you want one, I could try.)

It was not a good idea, to try to con my mother,
making my math test disappear with a flush
of the toilet, which promptly backed up.
Math was toxic to me then, but
it would have been better to face it,
her wrath over a C-, maybe with a note
that said, What happened?? Better to face it
than to stand there saying, when she asked,
“What’s this?” that it appeared to be a
piece of paper of some sort, and I had no idea
what it was or how it got there, or whose it was.

Eventually, this game was banished to the basement,
but I used to play it anyway, torturing myself with
anticipation of the buzzer, all the pieces exploding
from their homes because I had failed at the task
of placing all of them before time ran out.
But which basement? I swear, I remember this
from the last house, our final destination,
the last place my mother lived. She and I played
Boggle, not Perfection, at the kitchen table — laughing
at dirty words, not bothering to write them down.

___________________________________________________________
5 (to explain later)

Everyone in Thief River Falls, Minnesota, gambled on everything,
so it’s not all that shocking, maybe, that when we were 6, 7, or 8,
Lon Anderson (not Loni, just a boy in my class) bet me two dollars
that he could jump from the top of the jungle gym, and like a dummy —
what did I know? — I took the bet, which caused problems at home
that I had not anticipated, when I asked for two dollars, explained
why I needed it. My parents chose that moment to be piously Protestant,
to abhor gambling, or at least, their daughter taking part in it
at such a young age. After much hushed discussion, they decided
I would have to go to school empty-handed, explain to Lon Anderson
that I wasn’t allowed to gamble and should not have taken that bet,
and that I was sorry. Why don’t I remember following through?
Did I secretly borrow two dollars from my brother or find it in my room,
or did I break my promise to Lon, and it turned out to be no big deal?
In any case, now I know not to bet against someone who says they can
do something; every Lon has jumped off that jungle gym many times before.

The same road that goes to 100 Oaks Mall
also goes to the doctor’s office — be brave, be brave.
One thing your mother says is that she’ll never lie to you,
say that you’re only going shopping when you’re really going
for your allergy shot (how often — weekly?), and as far as you know,
that’s true. She didn’t. Still, how are you supposed to be brave
when bravery does nothing to protect you, when no amount of
begging makes your mother turn the car around or decide
that today’s a better day for shopping, after all?

For some reason, someone in the produce department
at The Andersons General Store on Bent Tree Road
is talking about abortion, and for some other reason,
my mother (who is peeling corn and tossing the husks
into the provided plastic trash barrel) ventures to say
to this stranger that she agrees, that she, too, is pro-life
and against the killing of babies. I back up toward
the pyramid of honeydews, wanting to disappear
because I can’t make this moment disappear, this
reminder that, along with all the other things she is,
my mother is an Ohio suburban Republican, after all,
and anti-abortion. I couldn’t argue with them then,
this stranger and my mother, and I can’t argue now —
The Andersons is gone, my mother is gone, the corn
is gone, too, of course, and Bent Tree Road may as well be.

To know and to be known,
that’s all it is, a hunger for place,
the feeling that change is always possible
but never required. Being, at last,
an immovable object. Unmoved. At last.

You can choose to block it out if you want,
with a syndicated rerun of M*A*S*H*,
but then you might miss something important
in the quiet quiet loud quiet of your parents in the kitchen,
your father telling your mother about his day at work,
your mother giving him advice, your father telling her —
what? (I never really caught that part, only that
often, he yelled, and sometimes she did, too),
and then it’s time for dinner, and no one has to
talk at all because the news is on —
the nuclear arms race, maybe, or Iran Contra,
and everyone is tense, but no one has said it,
that you’ll be moving again; if anyone knows yet,
at least no one has said it. Yet.

When Mount St. Helens erupted
in the spring of 1980, I made much of it,
telling my first-grade classmates in Minnesota
how close we’d lived to that mountain —
not true at all, but I needed something
to secure myself as something other than
the new kid, having gone through days and days
of crying over math worksheets, how many pennies
to buy a whistle, how many pink erasers for a quarter?
Anyway, the drama of a disaster was useful
in crafting my new persona at age 7,
and also, I dabbled in meanness, one time
telling a boy who asked me how to spell electricity
that it was E-L-L-E-E-T-T-T-R-I-C-I-T-T-Y,
causing (once he realized) a disastrous fury
of erasing on that cheap paper they gave us.
One thing I can’t remember is if it was him or me
who drew Mount St. Helens, a better-than-stick-figure
man falling off the top; probably there was lava, too.

____________________________________________________________________
12 (to be explained)

But what is there to forgive?
Life is the making of ghosts, perhaps,
for all of us, in one way or another.
If I hadn’t moved all those times,
someone else would have —
a best friend or a solid neighbor,
my world sliding down like a sandcastle,
even as I stayed in one place.
Houses move on around us, too,
only frozen in time if we have that
snapshot moment, from the car
pulling down the driveway,
watching the garage door close
one last time.